Mists of Pandaria Cooking Preview
The recent beta builds have updated and added several cooking quests, most of which take place in the Halfhill Market in the Valley of the Four Winds. The Nomi line takes advantage of the new Friendship system that is similar to reputation. In order to begin questing with Nomi, you must first complete the To Be a Master quest and earn Ironpaw Token x 100 to purchase Cooking School Bell. The quest requires you to have 600 cooking in every specialization.

Each cooking specialization has an individual level which determines which recipes you can learn for that specialization. Your highest level specialization will be your cooking level, which will allow you to learn any non specialization recipe that requires a certain cooking level. You can see the recipes that have been added so far on WoWDB.

The "Select a Hero" menu will now also display the difficulty level for each character

Several speed improvements have been made to the streaming downloader

Achievements

All players in a party should now receive "Till Death Do Us Part" even if they don’t have Haedrig Eamon as their active follower

Acts

Act IV

Witch Doctors should no longer receive an error if they kill a Shadow Clone with a Damage-Over-Time (DoT) skill after it's launched a Firebomb but before it's reached its target

Auction House

The auction log in the Completed tab will now display a player's activity (bids, buyouts, sales, etc) in the proper order

When placing a new bid over a previous bid on the same auction, players will now be provided with the correct warning message: "Raising your maximum bid on an Auction you are already winning raises your current bid to just above your previous maximum bid. Are you sure you want to continue?"

Players will now receive an error message if they attempt to purchase an item after the 50 item limit has been reached in the Completed tab

The "Physical Damage" Preferred Stats option for rings has been renamed to "Bonus Minimum Physical Damage"

The "All Damage" Preferred Stats option for weapons and armor has been removed and replaced with bonuses of specific damage types

Items which have been purchased from a vendor and equipped by the player can now be sold on the Auction House

Listing items on the Auction House from a different character than the one currently selected should no longer cause item display issues

Battle.net

The public chat list will now sort alphabetically

Classes

Witch Doctor

Spirit Vessel (Passive) no longer clears debuffs when using waypoints or changing equipment

Diablo III Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Why do we Identify Rare Items?
Let’s start off small: Scrolls of Identification are no longer in the game. Unidentified items and the act of identifying them is still very much part of the game, but now when obtaining an unidentified item you'll simply right click it, a short cast timer will occur as your character examines the item, and it will become identified. We love the double-discovery of finding a present and then unwrapping it, but we don't think it requires a physical item you have to find and keep in your bags to get the same effect. From now on you'll just be able to inherently identify all your items, no need to carry scrolls. Your character in Diablo III is just that badass now. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Legendary Item QualityWho doesn't want Legendary items to be the best items in the game?
Players shouldn't, really. I mean if you want all end-game characters to look the same and have on the exact same items by having a single #1 best item in the game, it's a good way to get there. It's a lot easier, to be sure, to just chase a single BiS item, but we really don't believe it should be a lot easier. It should be difficult to find and judge and compare and build characters out of a mix of randomized items, not just go after a tier set.

Hah. Well, no one is standing back, every designer is in the thick of it working on future updates, patches, hotfixes, etc. I think it really comes down to a perception issue that color quality differentiation and name have made. If the items were called Uniques, as they were in Diablo II, would you assume they were the best items in the game? Maybe, if they're the hardest to find. But I think the point is that the hardest to find items are not in fact Legendaries, but perfect Rare items. It's less intuitive to not have clear separations of item power through name and color, and that's tripping people up to be sure.

But that's not the issue here, the issue here is the legendaries are worse than rares and blues. And that should not be. Please accept that THIS is what players want. For once in my life I am VERY comfortable speaking for everyone. We're accustomed to the term "Legendary" actually MEANING something.
And we've stated we plan to buff them and add more unique affixes.

I don't know ... we're looking to buff them. Whether we guarantee a blue item dropping in the same difficulty/Act can't have higher DPS than a Legendary is still a judgment call we've yet to make. It'd sure make more sense to people who are stuck on item colors telling them which should be better, but whether it's the best for game's itemization I think is still up in the air. Giving players a clear 'best item' is not necessarily the best decision for the game and itemization landscape.
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Auction House and Item Drop RatesI have ZERO chance to find a legendary, because the server has now adjusted the rates on the fly, because others have already found it.
That's not what was said or implied at all, sorry if it was confusing. The AH doesn't have any affect on the literal drop rates of items depending on what's available.

What I said, and what is true, is that with far more players and an increased proliferation of item trade, we have to factor in how many items are being found by players and how quickly a player can gear up by 'sourcing' items from others through trade and the convenience of the gold auction house.

If we say "a player should have X power in Y amount of time through drops" and completely ignore that the time factor can be reduced by simply having access to more drops through trading and the auction house, players would be gearing up far quicker than we've determined they should. It has nothing to do with the auction house per se, but the general ease at which players have access to more items than they would without it and us needing to keep that in mind while balancing drops. It would be rather poorly thought out if we balanced drops completely ignoring all of the ways players can gear up, and trading is certainly one of them.

Obviously everyone wants the best gear possible as quickly as possible, and us attempting to mediate that through design that takes all factors into account is not always going to be a popular notion. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blizzard Games News Update
Pico is back with a Blizzard Games News update!